CHICAGO – A Texas man has been convicted of orchestrating a cryptocurrency scheme that swindled nearly 1,000 people out of at least $14 million.<\/p>\n
What we know:<\/p>\n
Robert Dunlap, 54, of Houston, was convicted on two counts of mail fraud on Monday after a week-long trial.<\/p>\n
According to officials, Dunlap worked with others to market and sell a digital asset called “Meta-1-Coin” through “Meta-1-Coin Trust,” from 2018 through 2023.<\/p>\n
Dunlap claimed that Meta-1-Coin was backed by as much as $1 billion in art and $44 billion in gold, according to a fake accounting firm. The fake art collection had been claimed to include works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dal\u00ed, Vincent van Gogh, and many others.<\/p>\n
Dunlap used automated trading bots to inflate the market price and trading volume of the Meta-1-Coin on the “Meta Exchange,” a website created by Dunlap.<\/p>\n
His scheme caused nearly 1,000 investors to lose at least $14 million.<\/p>\n
What’s next:<\/p>\n
His sentencing hearing is scheduled for Feb. 17, 2026. Dunlap faces a maximum of 40 years in federal prison.<\/p>\n
The Source: Details for this story were provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Illinois.<\/p>\n
Crime and Public Safety<\/a>News<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO – A Texas man has been convicted of orchestrating a cryptocurrency scheme that swindled nearly 1,000 people…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1046,56,58,57,223],"class_list":{"0":"post-58614","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-crime-publicsafety","9":"tag-houston","10":"tag-houston-headlines","11":"tag-houston-news","12":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}